Mrs. T and I returned to our place in Connecticut yesterday, turned on the TV, and saw what was happening in New York City, my other adopted hometown. Friends of mine who live there have been plunged into a daily misery that is shockingly new to them, and for the most part they’re unable to spread the word about their situation because they have no electricity. I grieve to behold their plight.
Train service from Connecticut to New York is limited and erratic. Even if we could get to our apartment in upper Manhattan, we’d be stuck there, since our subway stop is out of service. So here we sit, watching the news and marveling anew at the harshness of life–from a distance.
It happens that I was in Smalltown, U.S.A., on 9/11, and wasn’t able to fly back to New York for five agonizing days. Much the same thing is happening to me now. The experience, as I wrote not long afterward, was deeply unsettling:
I awoke to find myself a stranded man, unable to return to New York to share whatever its fate might be. Of course I had it easy, far more so than most of the thousands of other Americans who had been caught short on that bright Tuesday morning. Some of them were in the air, others in strange hotel rooms, but I was holed up with my mother in the small town where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. My brother and his family lived just three blocks away. As exiles go, mine was to be both comforting and comfortable–and brief. But it was an exile all the same, and with every passing minute it grew harder to endure….
No doubt Dr. Johnson, that most cold-eyed and hard-headed of sages, would dismiss what I wrote back then as cant. None but a fool longs to share suffering needlessly, there being more than enough of it in one man’s lifetime to go around. That said, it still feels strange–and sad–to be exiled from a suffering New York City yet again.
It’s remarkable that the Goetzes were able to transform so elegantly turned a book as “Washington Square” into a fully stageworthy play, and even more remarkable that they contrived to do so without compromising its essence. Not only did they incorporate much of James’ dialogue into the script, but they also stuck close to his plot, adding only two neat and very effective touches of climactic melodrama. What disappeared along the way was the sardonic narrative voice in which James tells the tragic tale of how Catherine Sloper (Ms. Chastain) avenges herself on Morris Townsend (Dan Stevens) for dashing her romantic hopes–and on her well-meaning but cold-hearted father (David Strathairn) for always having treated her like a homely dullard. Fortunately, Dr. Sloper’s part contains more than enough “light remnants and snippets of irony” (James’ phrase) to make up for what has been lost in translation, especially when it’s played with the blandly stealthy malice that Ralph Richardson brought to the role on screen in 1949.